I have been considering getting into bitcoin mining for a little while now and while doing research i found myself here.

I have seen what butterfly labs has to offer and heard both good and bad stories about getting product from them. Being hardware guy in IT i am wondering if its more pratical to build your own system for higher preformance then go with BL or if they have corrnered the market.

Does anyone know of a startup how-to that can give me an idea on the direction i should go in?

It would be really hard to design/build your own Bitcoin miner. I've heard nothing but bad news about BFL so I recommend you stay away from them. However, there are other companies that are selling mining hardware that you could look into.

You could just build a computer and mine other coins then convert it back to Bitcoin (more flexibility but less profit).

Other option is to just straight up buy coins with the money you were going to spend on a mining rig. No worry about setup and costs.

In order to mine bitcoins successfully, you need an ASIC miner. You cannot build one yourself, so you must buy one. I suggest comparing the profitability of all the different miners here before you buy: http://thegenesisblock.com/mining/

Spoiler: You will not make a profit regardless of which one you buy.

If you are interested in mining, then I suggest that you look into mining scrypt-based altcoins. You can do that with your computer and you can potentially make a few dollars a day. I wouldn't buy new equipment to mine altcoins because it will be unlikely to pay for itself.

I have been considering getting into bitcoin mining for a little while now and while doing research i found myself here.

I have seen what butterfly labs has to offer and heard both good and bad stories about getting product from them. Being hardware guy in IT i am wondering if its more pratical to build your own system for higher preformance then go with BL or if they have corrnered the market.

Does anyone know of a startup how-to that can give me an idea on the direction i should go in?

By the sounds of it ... most of you are saying there is no point in mining bitcoin, it sounds like i missed the boat.

I check on https://cex.io/calc and I would have 8BTC by the end of the year but around Nov the monthly profit falls to -0.04 and continue to drop month over month. Is this because of the amount of people who are mining?

Yet i see many people starting up am i missing something here?

What about using using a miner to go after litecons or something else?

Another question is if your not mining then what else is there to do to get into bitcoins?

It is easier and cheaper to build an alt coin miner. Alt coins can also be very profitable. It might be worth giving that a try first if you are completely new to all this and see how you get on before investing a lot of money into a bitcoin miner. I was thinking of getting one for £4000 but it as a 3 month wait before the unit would be dispatched and they only accepted bank transfers. My bank told me that if they never sent the unit there is no way they would be able to get my money back because it was a bank transfer so I decided to do Alt Coin mining instead.

You can get a rough idea of what you will get from calculators like http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators However take this with a pinch of salt. These numbers are best case senario and do not factor in rejected shares, orphaned blocks and what you will really get if you are in a mining pool. They tell you solo mining stats and solo mining isn't viable unless you are mining at launch when rewards are high, difficulty is low and not many people are mining.

In addition that is my personal opinion and experience. Being and hardware professional and if you have significant capital to invest into your hardware I would say go for the bitcoins. If you have doubts or want to test the waters first I would say have a go with the Alt Currencies first and trade them for Bitcoins. You can still get high yields. I met a guy who traded his mooncoin for bitcoin and made £12,500, he claims that was in two weeks running 12 graphics cards. There were other miners there too who backed his story.